10 months old!

Will someone please tell my baby to stop growing??? There's gotta be some kind of magic potion somewhere out there that can freeze babies at their current growth level, right? I would really appreciate that right now. I'm just really not ready for another big kid. And I'm really enjoying Eliza as a baby. I only have 2 more months of that. Sad.

This month we discovered a sure-fire way to make Eliza laugh and smile:
play peek-a-boo using a Santa hat. Works every time!
Eliza has been spotted carrying her sippy cup around in her teeth.
This is the best picture I could get...

She is SO into things. Here she is opening a Christmas present that Cat wrapped with Daddy's help and insisted on putting under the tree weeks before Christmas. This is the reason I didn't wrap anything until Christmas Eve.
(Oh, and let's be honest. Jack opened his fair share as well.)

Kind of silly, but I wanted to document these cool shoes someone handed down to us. They're peace sign Converse. They're impossible to get on her because they're hi-tops, but they look so cute!

This month Eliza also waved for the first time (she waved to Jack when he said goodbye to her as I took her to her room for her nap) and she clapped for the first time (while we were visiting our adopted Granny). We also began seeing teeth #4-6. Yowsers!

"Until next month..."

Christmas

Behold, the Official 2010 Christmas Picture!

And here are a few of the ones we took in the process of getting the official one...
Because, guess what, our kids aren't perfect. Even when we're documenting them.
But you already knew that, didn't you?

The bedtime story with C & J on Christmas Eve: Little Red Riding Hood. Good one, right? Yes, a wolf trying to eat a little girl who is delivering cookies to her grandmother is the perfect choice of Christmas Eve reading material.
But they enjoyed it, and they went to sleep, so that's what matters. :-)

Christmas Morning: Stockings!

Eliza wondered what all the excitement was about.
Cat helpfully emptied the contents of Eliza's stockings for her. (She also emptied Jack's for him, when he became preoccupied with one toy that was at the top.)

Eliza opening her first Christmas present.

It was a jacket from Mema. Cat was just as excited as Eliza!

Grammy gave Jack a rocking horse, which is really cool. But he was scared of it for a few days and didn't want to ride on it. You can kind of tell here. What a cutie!

Cat beat Ben in their inaugural round of her new game, "Pretty Pretty Princess." But I think I was the real winner, because check out the picture I got! What a good Daddy.

Santa brought Cat some nail polish, and I let her paint nails for the first time. Not just her nails, but mine too. A few days later, Ben said to me, "it looks like a kindergartener painted your nails." But I think she did a pretty good job.
(The big toes have red with clear glitter all around them. She was being creative.)

Because I was so crazy in December (I mean, certifiable) we didn't really do any Christmas crafts. So on Christmas afternoon while Ben did some work, I decorated some ornaments with the kids. C & J colored theirs while I attempted to get E's handprint on a bigger one.

All in all, it was a great Christmas. We hope you had a good one too!

Christmas Preparations

I wasn't really ready for Christmas when it came time to get ready for Christmas. I was a little slow getting things done. But, lucky for us, Cat was VERY EAGER for our Christmas celebration to begin. Ben pacified her one night by bringing the Christmas decorations down from the attic. I thought that should keep her happy for a few days, but I was mistaken. Evidently, she was so ready for Christmas to come that one evening while I was gone to a meeting, she convinced Ben that they should begin decorating the tree. I was a bit hurt when I heard that they'd done it without me, until I saw what they'd done:

Ben took the tree out of the box (no real tree for our family, yet...) and put it together, without "fluffing" anything. And they put one ornament on each. Okay. I can live with that.

The next chance we had to decorate the tree together was a few days later. Cat was gung-ho and we finished pretty quickly. Our tree is mostly decorated with homemade ornaments, which, much to my surprise, I love. I'm looking forward to adding a lot more of these. And the cool thing about having so many is that if a few of them break through the years, it's not such a big deal, right? (Notice that even Ben and I have some ornaments from when we were kids with our pictures on them. I'm so glad we have these!)

Jack helped put a few ornaments on. He made up for it later in the month by taking lots of ornaments off the tree, though.

Eliza was the ornament inspector.

Our Christmas celebration has finally begun!

Later that day, the kids got to play with their Little People Christmas story set for the first time.

Jack's favorite things were the camels. He lined them up on the rug.

And he lined them up on top of the wise men's tents.

Then he decided the sheep was getting a little rowdy and needed to be detained.

Eliza enjoyed the new toys too, but in a different way.

November: DONE!

November was a fun and busy month for us. Just check it out...

• We tried to keep up with a Thankful Tree, filling our mantel with leaves which had things we were thankful for written on them. We did this (almost) every night that we were home, and here are a few of my favorites:

Cat - applesauce, warm fire, Mom & Dad, Jesus Christ, prophets, my bedroom
Jack - Thomas (the train), Daddy, Dumbo, Thomas (the train, again),
applesauce, Dumbo (again), train, Percy (the train)

• It got cold enough to build a fire in mid-November. A nice fire is pretty much the best reason for winter, in my mind. Hot chocolate is a close #2.
• A good friend watched Jack for me so that Eliza and I could enjoy a delicious Thanksgiving feast with Catherine and the rest of her kindergarten class. Well, I enjoyed it a little more than Eliza did, evidently.
  

We spent a weekend with my Mom and siblings in Columbia (I found it funny that we wouldn't be all together over any major holidays, but USC's Homecoming football game brought us all home). Even though the adults outnumbered the children 8-5, we all went to EdVenture and had a great time.

We spent Thanksgiving weekend with Ben's family in Tallahassee and loved it. Cat had a wonderful time playing with all of her cousins, and even got to make a special fishing trip with Papa, Uncle John, Daddy, and Cassy. Jack's favorite thing was digging in the "dirt pit" in the backyard, and pretty much anything else he go to do outside. We got rained out the night we wanted to have our campfire and hayride, so we ended up doing it on Saturday afternoon. It was just as fun during the day!

Miscellaneous fun November pictures.

October: DONE!

It's about time, right?

October projects:
owl cookies with Aunt Suz, painting miniature pumpkins,
fall-ish painting, and ghost cookies

The day before Halloween, we spent several hours at Fort Clinch State Park at Fernandina Beach, FL. We met some cousins there and enjoyed a picnic lunch, playtime at the playground in the woods, and sand & kite fun on the beach. The weather was beautiful and we had a wonderful time together! Next time, we might actually tour Fort Clinch. :-)

On Halloween afternoon, Cat was a flower girl for the first time! My friend Candace got married and asked her to be a part of the wedding. Best quote of the day: when I was driving her to the wedding, Cat said, "Ewww! They're gonna kiss! I can't wait to see that. It is so gross. They're just gonna share germs."
Candace's son (and Cat's buddy) Jaden was the ring bearer. Cat was a little shy, but did a wonderful job... right up until the last few minutes of the ceremony, when she started to pull her dress up because she had to go to the bathroom. The little church where the wedding was held was so small, and so crowded with well-wishers that we couldn't find a bathroom... we ended up driving down the road to a good friend's house so that the flower girl could quickly get back in time for pictures.

And at the last minute we decided to do a little trick-or-treating, and our friends/neighbors joined us. Obviously, I went the easy route for costumes this year, and let the kids wear the Chinese outfits their Grammy bought them. But it worked out great; Cat enjoyed being "Mulan," and Jack and Eliza didn't complain. I guess Cat was the princess version of Mulan, though, since she still wanted to wear the tiara from the wedding that afternoon.

Cute kids enjoying fall!

9 months old!

I think with every child I've had, 9 months has been a significant milestone for me, because it's when your baby reaches the point of being alive outside of the womb longer than he/she was inside. It's so interesting how it feels like Eliza has always been a part of our family. Has it really only been 9 months?? And at the same time, the 9 (or so) months I was pregnant with her felt like they dragged on forever. Funny, huh?

We realized that we can start playing with her hair a little. Especially after bathtime.

So, this month, Eliza officially became the 3rd Mischief Maker in the family. I introduced her to my stash of random plastic containers, which I'm pretty sure she enjoyed.

She found this cabinet of plastic (Tupperware-type) items on her own.
I'm not sure which cabinet she likes better.

Another shot of my kitchen helper.

I think she grabbed this little item from the dishwasher as I was trying to unload it:

This is one of Eliza's favorite hangout spots. It makes me so nervous that she likes to stand right there! Kind of precarious, don't you think? But there have been several times when I know she's crawled off somewhere and I go looking for her and find her in here.

She has started smiling for the camera. Atta girl!

Other notable developments this month: her third tooth started coming in, she DANCED for the first time (when Jack played some music on one of Cat's My Little Pony toys), and she tried Cheerios for the first time.

No Training Wheels

Early in October, Cat decided to ride her bike without training wheels. She had done this once before, but it didn't last for very long; she asked us to put the training wheels on later that day. This time, however, she practiced for about an hour in the driveway, and then she was confident enough to go out in the neighborhood with Ben.

And at the end of the day, she was mostly unscathed. That's because she had a foolproof method of injury-avoidance: ABORT! While she was still in the practice-in-the-driveway phase, she hadn't figured out how to slow herself down with her feet or the brakes, and she wasn't very good at steering and turning, so when a crash was inevitable, she would just jump off of the bike. You see it a little at the end of this video:

But this is a better demonstration:

Cat explained it this way: "You jump off before you fall if you're thinking you're gonna fall. If you feel the bike tip over and you're wobbling, then you gotta jump off and it'll fall down, k? That's how you get safety."

Within one or two weeks, Cat looked like a seasoned bike rider. She could turn and slow down perfectly, and even managed to do figure 8's in the road. Now she and Ben go out on bike rides every chance they get. Sometimes they let Jack tag along in the trailer, or they let me jog with them. But it's usually just the two of them and I love that they have something fun that they enjoy doing together.

PS> I had to include this video because it kind of reminds me of the beginning of The Wonder Years. :-)